


break me like a promise

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Half-Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 17:40:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Seems we are siblings after all,” Jon had said, his voice forcibly light, as if to make the words a jape. Perhaps to soften the news, or diminish the realness of it. Perhaps because he had as much difficulty believing it as she, having known himself a Targaryen near as long as he’d thought himself a Stark bastard. And they had been married such a short time; it was too fast to be real, too sudden to seem anything but a cruel trick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	break me like a promise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lit_chick08](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lit_chick08/gifts), [thefairfleming](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairfleming/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: Jon/Sansa – Due to a misunderstanding everyone believes that Jon is the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna instead of Ned’s son. The truth is revealed to Jon and Sansa after they’ve already fallen in love and been married for a while. Jon and Sansa now have to decide if they should break it off or just keep this new revelation to themselves.

It all seems a dream. Not the sweet, gentle dreams of her girlhood – the happy dreams Sansa had before she knew any other kind existed – but a terrible dream, a nightmare that haunts only waking hours.

Jon had been the one to tell her. She suspects he learned it from Sam, who’d stopped meeting her eye just before then, hurrying away with an apology hidden in the twisted line of his brow when she spoke to him. Sam could have told her, but Jon did. She thinks he most likely insisted, wanting no one else to tell her such unhappy news, thinking it honorable. But Sansa would rather have learned it from someone else, someone she could have railed against in anger.

“Seems we are siblings after all,” Jon had said, his voice forcibly light, as if to make the words a jape. Perhaps to soften the news, or diminish the realness of it. Perhaps because he had as much difficulty believing it as she, having known himself a Targaryen near as long as he’d thought himself a Stark bastard. And they had been married such a short time; it was too fast to be real, too sudden to seem anything but a cruel trick.

In her heart, she wonders if she already knew. If she’s always known, but never cared. If her time as Alayne had twisted her and made her wrong, made her desire what she should not. But she pushes those thoughts aside. There is enough pain here without seeking out more. Keeping apart from him when he is yet her husband, when all of Winterfell believes them only husband and wife still, is the cruelest torment in a life that has been overfull of them.

Sansa had thought she already knew all the ways a heart could break.

“I should leave here,” she says one day. “I should go somewhere far.” It’s the memory of his kiss that makes her say it, of his mouth and hands and the sweetness of his heart when he loved her. All the things she suddenly finds she cannot go without when he’s near.

“I won’t allow it,” he says, his hand a steel cuff around her arm to prove it.

“It would be easier,” she says, and all her miserable, hopeful heart is in her words.

“Easier for whom?” he asks, and then it’s his kiss and mouth and hands and sweetness that make her stay, that make her writhe and squirm and cry out in anguished pleasure. He tastes every bit of her, his tongue delving into shadowed places to make her shiver and moan and die, he moves within her while drawing the peak of her breast between his lips to suckle, and she doesn’t know how she could ever stop herself wanting this, though she knows that she must.

It’s Jon who taught her what need is. She’d not come to him a maid, but she’d felt as shy and new as a blushing virgin when he’d taken her to his bed. Tears still come to her eyes at the memory of his tenderness, his gentle ardor, at how he’d explored every bit of her body as if to memorize her, mapping her contours with fingers and tongue. The first days of their marriage had been heady and sweet, a rush of laughter and happiness that she felt constantly impelled to grasp at with both hands to keep it close, to keep it from being taken from her, like so many other happinesses. They’d not been brother and sister for years – indeed, perhaps they never truly had been, not the way he and Arya were – and it had been easy, so very easy to love him. Nearly as difficult as it is now not to.

Sam cannot meet her eyes any more, has not been able to since the day she learned the truth. Sansa knows she should put him at ease. All her life has been spent learning to be a lady, taking care to ensure that no one feels discomfort in her presence. But she finds she has no wish to give him comfort. It’s unfair to blame him, surely, but she can’t seem to help it. Perhaps she doesn’t wish to. So few words from him and the one sure thing in her life was ruined nearly before it had begun; that is something that merits her resentment, no matter how unfair it may be.

“He thinks you hate him,” Jon tells her quietly at supper one night, after Sam has hastily left the table to return to his burrow, a tiny, dim room stuffed from floorboard to rafter with books. Sansa doesn’t answer. Instead she takes a deep draught of wine, the words that linger on the back of her tongue – “Perhaps I do” – turning the sweet wine bitter.

She’s taken to riding in the afternoons, long hours spent exploring the countryside of her girlhood. The saddle is hard beneath her, the horn uncomfortable where she hooks her knee. She could ride as Arya always did, with a man’s saddle, and say to all seven hells with it, but she wants the discomfort; it distracts her, keeps her focus here instead of on the things she’s attempting to forget. It is an attempt that fails. Time passes with the drumbeat of hooves, with the whistle of the wind, but still she doesn’t forget.

Jon is there one day when she returns to the stables just ahead of a rainstorm, clearly just returned from a ride himself. For a sick moment, Sansa wonders if he’d gone to Wintertown, if he’d at last availed himself of one of the whores there, as she’d once told him he should (“I want no woman but you,” he’d said fiercely, and he’d spent more than an hour proving it, kissing her, touching her, fucking her, only to leave her alone in her bed with regret and self-reproach on his face, and she’d known he’d not come to her rooms again). But that is not Jon, she knows. Their lives might be easier if it were. And yet she could never wish for such a thing.

“Let me,” he says now when she moves to dismount, catching her waist with both hands before her foot can touch the mounting block. Heat flares through her instantly, every bit of longing and need she’s felt blazing to life at his touch until she thinks her body only a shell, encasing nothing but flame. He feels it as well, she knows he does, no matter how he tries to keep it from her. There are no secrets between them, not any longer, no matter that it’s been more than a moon since she last knew his touch.

As if orchestrated perfectly, the hem of her gown snags on the rough-hewn edge of the mounting block. Immediately, Jon kneels, freeing the cloth with careful hands, hands that once touched her just as carefully, that coaxed out her tangles and freed her from something she could not name. The storm has come to meet them, rain pattering onto the roof and outside the half open door. It cocoons them somehow, makes it seem as if nothing exists but this room, smelling sweetly of hay and full of the sounds of rain and horses and their own breathing. Her hands move of their own volition, reaching to spear through the soft mass of his hair. The ink-black curls make her hands look pale and fragile, but she feels only strong touching him. Why should she give him up? a rebellious part of her wonders. He leans into her touch, his eyes closed. She touches the line of his brows, runs a fingertip over the rich sweep of his lashes, down the long-ago-broken ridge of his nose, over scars and lines and skin.

“I have missed you so very much, Jon,” she whispers, and her hands echo the words, reacquainting themselves with the face she loves so well.

The change in him is immediate. It is as if he is a great beast that’s been chained and suddenly freed. With a broken groan, he pulls her to him, pressing his face into the soft swell of her abdomen before his hands find her hems and drag them up her legs, legs that are suddenly trembling and watery with anticipation. Impatience is in his every movement and it makes him rough and insistent, his mouth opening hot and wet over her through her smallclothes, sucking at her through the cloth until he lets her skirts drop about him so he can wrench her smallclothes down her legs and put his mouth on her bare flesh. She cries out his name, her voice breaking on the word. The heavy brocade of her gown hinders her, frustrates her; she wants to touch him, wants to feel him as his mouth disassembles her and creates her anew, but she can only grasp at him through the cloth, pulling him closer, wanting his tongue, his lips, wanting all of him on her and inside her.

Her knees give out when her release takes her. He follows her down to the straw, his tongue still on her – she can feel the soft insistence of it, the pressure as she throbs against his mouth – and then he begins again, and when he has made her peak once more, he crawls up her body and makes love to her and she is undone, she is whole, he is her brother and she does not have it in her to care.

“Why is this so difficult?” she asks him quietly afterward, as she lies curled into him, his arms a protective cage around her. “We lived as brother and sister for years. Why can we not do so again?” His arms tighten to the point of pain and she feels his sigh everywhere she’s pressed against him.

“I didn’t know how sweet you tasted then,” he says. The words make her whole body tighten, her blood pulsing in memory of his tongue on her.

“We could run away,” she tells him. “We could pretend to be other people. We could pretend to be who we were before we knew. When we were happy.”

He doesn’t answer, only holds her a little bit closer. He holds her until the rain lessens and the sun fades and they must return to the keep. The next day when she rides, she hopes he’ll be there on her return, waiting for her.

He isn’t there. She does not ride again.

She begins to drink more at supper. She supposes it numbs the raw edges of her heart, edges that are jagged and tattered, as if a page had been torn from a book. It also allows her to be selfish, to indulge impulses that she knows are wrong. Jon is far nobler than she. He cleaves to his honor like it’s a woman he loves. “Do you not desire me?” she longs to ask him, but she knows that he does. There is a fine tremor in his hands when she’s near. His eyes drop to her lips each time they speak, darkening before they cut away. Sansa does not doubt his desire for her. She’s been sure of it from the moment he touched her as her husband. Most men would need little else, she thinks, perhaps even in a situation as thorny as theirs. Jon is not most men.

She acquires a nightshift from Dorne, a scandalous thing concocted of such filmy material that it might as well be sewn from moonlight and imagination. She greets him in his room wearing it, reveling in the way his eyes grow hot and dark, in the convulsive movement of his throat as he swallows. She may be assured of his desire, but she is no less thrilled by it every time.

“Do you like my new nightshift?” she asks him, in a purring voice not her own, a voice that she puts on much as she’s donned the gown. It makes him look sad, and suddenly she feels impossibly young, like a little girl playing at a game. He stands and takes a careful step towards her, one hand lifting to test the cobweb of lace at her shoulder, his fingers gentle and hesitant.

“It does not suit you,” he says.

“So take it off me,” she challenges, her words defiant, her heart as bruised as an overripe pear. She’s never seen him look so pained. He gathers her into his arms, her name cracking and trembling on his lips just before he presses them to her forehead, the way her father once used to – their father, hers and Jon’s – and all at once it’s as if a dam has broken. Sansa’s eyes flood with tears.

It’s not the seduction she’d intended, but her tears work on him in a way the thin nightshift over the promise of her body hadn’t. He gropes blindly for the chair behind him and sits heavily, pulling her to sit across his lap as he opens her lips with his tongue in a kiss so desperate it could bring her to tears were she not already crying.

“Sansa,” he says at her lips, “Sansa, Sansa,” at her jaw, at her throat, his fingers tucking themselves between her thighs and rubbing her through fabric that had seemed so insubstantial before but now might as well be wool for how it frustrates her and keeps her from feeling his touch on her skin.

“Please,” she pants. She tries to open her thighs, wanting to spread them across his lap, to hook her knee over the arm of the chair and spread herself wide for him. The need is obscene for how keen it is, how very desperately she wants to behave like the basest slattern and get his fingers in her cunt, those blunt fingers she remembers the feel of with a longing akin to anguish. But he resists her efforts, keeping her knees pressed together, only touching her through the cloth, the hand that she tries to guide to her breast staying stubbornly at her waist. This is all he’ll give her, she understands. No. All he’ll give himself.

She ceases her struggles, instead concentrating on moving to meet his fingers. He touches her with an efficiency born of intimate familiarity, knowing just how to bring her to quick release. But still he can’t seem to keep himself from teasing, slowing his fingers just when she’s trembling on the cusp, torturing her and also himself, it seems, from how he groans in her ear, his fingers at her waist tightening with bruising force. When she thinks she might truly go mad from it, he speeds his hand and whispers, “Come for me, sweet girl, the way I dream of every night. I’ll have your pleasure if I can’t have you.”

“You can have me,” she wants to cry, “you _do_ , I’m yours, I am only yours,” but her release takes her so strongly that she can’t breathe, let alone speak. She can only jerk and writhe in his arms as she peaks, and then she weeps, she weeps and weeps until she feels as shattered and empty as a broken eggshell. She weeps and he holds her until she falls asleep.

Jon is the soul of careful kindness in the days that follow, making no mention of their night together. It haunts him, though; she can tell in the clench of his jaw and the pouches that appear beneath his eyes to speak of sleepless nights. In dispassionate moments, she thinks on what made him give in to her in such a way. He might have resisted the lure of her body forever. It is her emotions that he can’t deny. A better woman would resolve not to use such knowledge against him. Sansa is not that woman. Perhaps he won’t take what he needs, but Sansa will, and she’ll do it for the both of them.

It’s late at night the next time she goes to his room. The house itself seems to be asleep around her, the walls issuing sighs and soft creaks, as if they settle into sleep the way those within them do. The stones are cool under her bare feet, as is the glass neck of the bottle in her hand. She lifts it and tips it up to her mouth, taking three long swallows of wine. The urge to hiccup wells in her throat as she knocks on Jon’s door, an urge that blossoms into reality when he opens the door in loose linen trousers and a dressing gown, his feet as bare as hers. She giggles at the sound of her hiccup and wiggles the bottle at him in apology and explanation.

“Let me sleep with you tonight, Jon,” she says with no preamble, unashamed at the naked plea in her voice. “I only need you to hold me. That is something brothers and sisters do, is it not? Didn’t we do just that when we were children?” A look of distress crosses his face; he would be the worst, most wonderful sort of father, she thinks with a pang, unable to deny his children anything.

“Sansa…”

“Just hold me as I sleep, Jon,” she presses on, speaking over anything he might say. “That isn’t so much to ask, is it? I never sleep as well as I do with you.” She knows he’ll surrender even before he reaches out to tug the bottle from her grip. He sets it down with a dull sound and then pulls her into his room and latches the door behind her, taking her hand to lead her slowly to his bed. Whether he goes so slowly to give her a chance to reconsider or himself a chance to resist, she’s not sure. She’s long past reconsidering, and she intends to give him no opportunity to resist. It is ruthless of her, but she cares nothing for it. She learned to survive long ago, and she’ll not apologize for the lessons now, not when the warm, sweet weight of his arms around her as they settle into sleep renders such a flimsy concept as guilt entirely meaningless.

She wakes before him, an unusual enough occurrence even if she’d not been drunk on half a bottle of wine the night before. In the pale light of morrow, his face looks older than she’d remembered, more drawn. She thinks he’s not been sleeping well, same as she. It explains how he still slumbers now, when most mornings he would be up with the dawn leaving her to burrow into the warmth of the furs with his kiss lingering on her lips. Gods, how good that life had been. She misses it with a physical ache, one that lodges beneath her ribs and throbs with each beat of her heart. No one could truly blame her for taking that life back, she thinks. Not even Jon.

He makes a soft, pleased murmur when she snakes her hand under the furs to find him hard, as he is so often of a morning. Instinctively, his body surges into her hand, wanting the touch his waking mind denies.

“Sansa,” he mumbles, voice thick with sleep, his eyes soft and unfocused when they flutter open to look at her.

“Jon,” she answers, all her need in that one word, all her love and desire for him.

“We can’t,” he says, even as he curls towards her, moving his hips with the rhythm of her hand as she strokes his cock through his smallclothes. She wants to tug the drawstring free so she may slip her hand inside and feel his skin, but she knows she must take care. His honor is a living thing and must be coaxed.

“Shh,” she tells him, her lips against his. “It’s not real, it’s only a dream.”

“A dream,” he echoes. His lips take hers in a kiss, his hand capturing hers under the furs only to push it beneath his smallclothes and wrap her fingers around his cock. Triumph sings through her. She should be ashamed at how ruthlessly she takes advantage, but she’s not. He’s so responsive to her touch; he always has been, from the first time she touched him, all while he told her she didn’t have to even as his eyes pleaded for her attentions. No man has ever been like Jon. No man ever will be again, she knows that as well as she knows anything.

Seized by a sudden urge for more, a need to make him hers in every way, she slips beneath the furs, ignoring his sleep-dulled protests and his fumbling hands that reach to stop her. He shivers at her breath washing over him and cries out at the first touch of her lips on his cock. The times she’s done this before are few, and she savors it now, greedily taking every quiver and moan, showing him with each stroke of her tongue that nothing will keep her from him, not even Jon himself.

Her name is a choked cry on his lips when he comes in her hand, her own lips pressed to the delicate jut of his hipbone. His hands are rough even through the furs as he grapples at her, hauls her up so that he may kiss her with the taste of him on her tongue.

“Sansa,” he sighs. “Sweet girl, beautiful girl, it’s wrong to want you so much, you are my…” The word hands unspoken in the air, as if he could keep her from being his sister if only he does not say the word.

“I am your wife,” she tells him, without the slightest bit of hesitation or doubt. “I am your Sansa.” Then she is crawling up to throw one thigh over his face, her shift bunching at her hips as he takes her invitation – acquiesces to her silent demand, in truth – and buries his mouth in her cunt with a deliciously pained groan. Her body jerks and shivers. Gods, but his mouth feels so very good on her she could weep from it. It’s been moons since he tasted her like this, so long, too long. It’s almost too much and with a whimper, she writhes away for a moment, tipping herself up on her knees as she tangles her fingers in his hair to keep him still.

“Sansa,” he begs, sounding completely broken. “Love, don’t tease, it’s been too long since I tasted you.” Despite his words, he doesn’t struggle against her hold; he would never fight her. In their bed she has always held as much control as she’s lacked in the world outside.

“And how do I taste?” she can’t resist asking, feeling wanton and wicked and powerful.

“Like coming home,” he says.

“ _Jon_.”

“Please, Sansa, let me taste you again, if I must sin I won’t do it halfway.” All the frustration of the past months is in his words, all the anguish and struggle and guilt. Here he is not her brother, she is not his sister; here they are truly wed, in the eyes of all gods that matter. Sansa intends to keep it that way.

Slowly, teasingly, she lowers herself towards his straining mouth, gasping at the feel of his lips and tongue on her. He does not tease her in retribution, as she most likely deserves; he only drives her hard and fast towards her peak, bringing her pleasure as ruthlessly as she’d broken down his honor before. Soon she’s writhing helplessly, shamelessly, reveling in the familiar rightness of his mouth on her, damn anyone who would dare call it wrong, Jon included.

His tongue presses against her gently when she’s peaked, soothing the aching throb of her cunt. He’ll hold his tongue there for just long enough and then he’ll begin again, she knows that from intimate experience, but she needs more from him now. She needs to feel his release inside her.

It is a mark of how completely he’s surrendered that he makes no attempt to stop her when she walks her knees down his sides until she straddles his hips, his cock hard once more, hard and ready and pressed so intimately against her. With a low, needy sound, she moves her hips, sliding along his length before catching hold of him with one hand and guiding him within her.

 _Not wrong,_ a small voice says inside her head, in time with the rock of her hips and the flex of his hands as he guides her, _not wrong, never wrong, this could never be wrong_. She comes again, quickly, but when he moves to pull away, to spill his seed on the furs as he’d done the other times they’d coupled since learning the truth, she tightens her hands on his wrists, her knees on his hips, her cunt around his cock.

“Give me a babe, Jon,” she pants, her own fingers tangling with his at the apex of her thighs, both of them giving her the keenest pleasure together. “Please, I want your child, give me a babe.”

“ _Sansa_.” Her name has the rough, serrated edge of a knife on his lips. It is his deepest desire, the thing he’s wanted most since he was only a boy – a family of his own.

“I thought we would be like them,” she says, her words rising into a sob. “Like mother and father, I thought we would fill Winterfell with our children and watch them grow.”

He is openly crying now, a tear tracking down each cheek to match her own. She leans down, closing his eyes with soft kisses, the taste of salt clinging to her lips. 

“Don’t pull away, Jon,” she whispers, her forehead pressed to his. “Give me your child.”

He kisses her fiercely at that. Then, in a lightning-quick movement, he rolls her beneath him and thrusts into her like a man gone mad, claiming her mouth as he claims her body. He peaks within her with a mighty shudder, and she holds him to her, wraps her arms and legs around him and holds him so close they could almost be a single being, and she is happy. For the first time in too long, Sansa is truly happy.

It’s he who comes to her room the next evening, so early that it’s scarcely dark, hunger warring with resignation on his face. She drinks in the sight of him as if she hasn’t seen him for a lifetime rather than a mere hour.

“I’m not strong enough,” he tells her, pulling her into his arms and burying his face in the crook of her neck. Her heart lurches with sympathy at the pain in his voice even as it thrills at his touch, at his words, at all they speak to. “I thought I could be, but I’m not.”

“This is not weakness,” she insists, fierce and sure, but he shakes his head, lifts it to rest his brow against hers.

“We cannot have a child,” he says, but his voice wavers. He wants a child with her near as desperately as she does with him; she can read it in the crease of his brow, in the unhappy twist of his lips. But he is determined to deny himself in the name of some pure ideal of rightness, some honor that is as obsolete as the Night’s Watch he no longer serves. He is determined to deny them both.

“Can we not?” she asks softly, deliberately misconstruing his meaning. “No child took during the time we believed ourselves husband and wife rather than brother and sister, but that was only a short while.”

“You know that’s not what I speak of,” he reproaches her, but gently, as if he regrets it as sorely as he does everything else. “You must take moon tea, Sansa. Sam will bring it to you tomorrow and you must drink it, and every day after.” It takes a long moment for the words to penetrate, but when they do, they leave a heavy ache in her chest.

“Moon tea,” she echoes faintly. He pulls back to look at her and oh, there is such pain on his face, such regret. It is all she can do not to pull his head to her breast so she may soothe him even as he hurts her.

He pauses, gropes for words in a way that reminds her of the boy he once was, uncertain and tentative, wanting to be accepted, aching to belong. “How I grew up… Sansa, I could not let a child of mine…” Suddenly she understands his meaning and she jerks back, stung despite herself.

“Our child would not be a bastard.”

“As good as,” he says.

“Then I’d be glad of it,” she counters. “Some of the finest people I know are bastards.”

“Sansa, please,” he says, so wearily that she softens, allowing him to tug her cheek to his shoulder, the two of them standing together as if in the most intimate of dances. “Give me this indulgence.” Then his voice changes, turning into a caress. “Give me all my indulgences.” His kiss is pleading and sweet. Tasting him again after she’d done so only this morning seems a heady decadence after going so long without.

“So this is the only way I may have you,” she says, and it’s not a question, but he nods, the tip of his nose dragging up her cheek to make her shiver. She says nothing, only walks backwards, leading him to her bed with their feet tangling and stumbling over each other. She says nothing and that awareness smolders in her breast like a brand, even as he claims her as if he’d never tried to set her aside.

Sam finds her in her solar the next afternoon. He stands beside her writing desk with a cup of tea on a small tray, fidgeting in his Maester’s robes, the chain looking as heavy and unwieldy as it had the first time she’d met him. She had thought he would grow comfortable in the role, but it seems she was wrong. She searches for judgment on his face, for condemnation, but there is only shyness, his cheeks reddening at her prolonged gaze.

“Thank you, Maester,” she says as he sets the tray down, though perhaps not as warmly as she might have done before he told Jon the truth of his parentage. She is afforded so few small luxuries; it is difficult to let go of such a satisfying grudge. His mouth twitches into something close to a smile and he bobs an awkward bow as he backs out of the room, nearly slamming the door in his haste to depart. When he’s gone, Sansa walks to her writing desk and picks up the cup he’d left there, examining it with detached interest. Steam rises in wafting curls from the surface of the liquid, the cup warming her hands as she holds it. It’s pale, far too pale to seem at all effective somehow. For a moment, Sansa hesitates. Jon asks her for so little. Then she remembers the look of keenest yearning on Jon’s face when he spoke of a child – of _their_ child. She remembers the wild joy that curled through her veins like a medicine when she took him inside her and felt his release. She remembers that for as little as Jon asks of her, he asks even less for himself.

The cup feels so much lighter after she’s carried it to the chamber pot and poured out every last drop of tea. Or maybe it’s Sansa herself that’s lighter. Serenely, she sets the cup back on the tray Sam had brought. She tidies her hair and straightens her dress and she goes to meet Jon for supper with a heart free from trouble or regret.


End file.
